by W.D James

During the first few months of this year I watched between 50 and 100 low budget Bigfoot (and related creatures) movies, some of them multiple times.

Now, even allowing for my previously confessed penchant for low budget horror films in general (and I watched quite a few other films in that category during the same period), that fact may raise some eyebrows. Why would a person do this? What does the fact that they did so say about them as a person? Is the fact that they admitted it publicly in an essay some sort of call for help?

Rather than take the safe approach of trying to come up with some reasons to justify why a sane, well-adjusted person with a relatively meaningful life might choose to watch that many Bigfoot movies, I’ll take the more audacious route and suggest that there is little better we could be watching.

In fact, I think the sub sub (sub?) genre of low budget Bigfoot films deals provocatively with many of the most important questions our civilization is dealing with and that it represents one of the few bright spots in our culture. Well, ok, that might be overselling them a tad. Or, maybe not.

In what follows I’ll outline four of these questions that are absolutely central to any notion of a Bigfoot film and recommend what, overall, I think is the best out of the set I have watched (though at least 20 or 30 of them are well worth watching).

Localism

Locale is central to any Bigfoot film. This is true of the other creatures I group with Bigfoot as well. There are the ones that are strictly variants on Bigfoot himself: the Yeti, the Sasquatch, the Abominable Snowman, the Skunk Ape, and the Bog Man. That he has different names for where he is found already reinforces the idea that locality is important. The same is true with the Pine Devil of the New Jersey Pine Barrens, the Wendigo of the Northeast or Northwest, the Chupacabra of the Southwest and Mexico, the Mothman of West Virginia, England, or Hungary (the only real one is the one in Point Pleasant, West Virginia, by the way).

On the one hand, the ‘monster’ is closely bound to the place he lives. In some real sense, he is a manifestation of that place just as a scorpion might be a manifestation of a desert or subtropical place. So, the people who encounter him are also necessarily encountering an aspect of this place.

That the ‘monster’ is always ‘hidden’ or ‘endangered’ suggests the place is too. And that is how it is in our modern world: places become extinct to be blended into the overall geography of nowhere.

The encounter with a Bigfoot raises questions of what place is this? Who are we who are here in this place? How are we related to this place? What does this place, and the ‘monster,’ mean?

One of the best films to bring out this aspect of the genre is Creature From Black Lake from 1976. It follows two anthropology students from the University of Chicago, Pahoo and Rives, as they search for the creature in the Louisiana bayou country. Pahoo and Rives are typical northern boys who find the backwoods culture of Louisiana to be as foreign, mysterious, and elusive as the ‘monster’ they are searching for.

Tradition

Of all the genres of horror, the Bigfoot horror flick is quite self-aware of what it is and the tradition it exists within. Horror in general is better at this than many other genres of film. So, Bigfoot movies play off of many of the themes and anti-themes of horror in general (does the ‘black character’ die first? Is that character aware of this trope and refer to it in the film? Do they say something like, ‘I’m a black man, there is no way I’m going out in the woods with a bunch of hillbillies looking for Bigfoot, I know what happens’?). Further, low budget Bigfoot movies are low budget, so they come with all the plusses and minuses of low budget horror in general: low production values, all the actors are probably friends of the director who may still be a film student, and on the other hand, doing the most with what you have, the opportunity to be way more creative than anything produced in Hollywood.

Specific to the Bigfoot variety, there are a whole set of well-established touchpoints that must usually be addressed. What is Bigfoot (ape creature, alien, spirit animal, guardian, science experiment, government secret weapon, monster)? You need to work in a character taking castes of his big footprints and note that he smells really bad. Is he more a sexual predator or more a family man (this is actually one of the more important decisions the filmmaker will make – see The Problem of Nihilism below)? What is his connection to local and indigenous lore? What to say about the iconic Patterson-Gimlin film?

Any Bigfoot movie has to take these factors into account, as well as the question of whether the film will be a documentary or fictional portrayal (in the Bigfoot genre this line is maximally porous). Hence, to enter into the watching of Bigfoot films is to enter into a living tradition where each new instance is organically bound up with all the films that came before and all the films yet to come. This magnifies the meaning latent in each one and orients us as to where we are in the tradition and to the more subtle messages the director or writer is sending.

A film that does an exemplary job in this regard is Willow Creek (2013), directed by Bobcat Goldthwait – you got to love that! It follows Jim, a true-believer, and his skeptical girlfriend Kelly, as they visit the tourist attractions in ‘Bigfoot Capital of the World,’ Willow Creek, CA. They discuss most of the tropes listed above as they first document the cultural phenomenon of Bigfoot (including interviewing a singer-songwriter who specializes in Bigfoot songs) before moving on to their encounter with the creature.

Nature

Then there is the whole question of nature: Bigfoot lives in nature, after all. What is it and what is our relationship to it? Is it essentially the survival-of-the-fittest variety that orthodox Darwinism pictures for us? Or is it more a Kropotkin-like web of mutual interdependence? Is it materialism all the way down, or is there a spiritual aspect? Are we essentially a part of it or essentially alienated? Is nature ‘savage’ or ‘endangered’?

A film that takes this on is the 1985 classic Boggy Creek II (a follow-up by the same director who had made the super classic docu-drama The Legend of Boggy Creek in 1972). After a professor from the University of Arkansas and his students finally track down the creature, they decide it is best to not tell anyone so as to preserve this ‘endangered’ species; very 80’s environmentalish there.

Belief

Of course, the central questions to any Bigfoot movie are does he exist and do you believe he exists? Does reality still harbor mysteries or not? This reflects back on some of the issues discussed above. What do we believe about nature? What about supernature? Does our locale actually exist and matter? What makes it this place and not some other place (and what makes we who have formed a settlement here a particular ‘people’ and what kind of people are we)?

Primal Rage (2018) approaches this set of questions especially interestingly. A solid subplot develops around the relationship between a wizened sheriff and his young deputy. Both are members of some unspecified indigenous people. The whole connection of Bigfoot to native lore is an issue in itself. In this case, the older sheriff is (seemingly) thoroughly modernized and secularized. It is his young deputy who believes, or at least says he is trying to believe, in his people’s traditional ways. The whole thing of having the young be more interested in the ‘old ways’ than the old are is perceptive. Eventually both end up reluctantly going to the local medicine woman and participating in a ceremony involving hallucinogenics. As it turns out, the old sheriff may not have been as skeptical all along, but may be one who recognized there were dangers in ‘the old ways’ that he was not wanting to get into. I’ll try not spoil it, but let’s just say the ‘old ways’ are quite alive and powerful in the world of Primal Rage.

The Problem of Nihilism

Horror, by its nature, deals with dark things. Metaphysically, one of the most important aspects of a horror film for me is: does the dark win? From the 2000s forward, and really speeding up in the 2010s, horror producers were increasingly willing to give us worlds that were dark all the way down (though H.P. Lovecraft had pretty much worked off that assumption back to the 1920s and 30s). No good guys, no monsters defeated, no light at the end of the tunnel, no redemption.

There are movies which follow this path which are good as films, but which I see as symptomatic of negative developments in our culture. We may be to the point where any film (book, painting, etc…) which does not show us a world that is meaningless and futile will be seen as unrealistic, utopian, or sentimental.

I was not systematically tracking this as I watched through those 50-100 films in no particular order. However, it may have started with Willow Creek. The ‘it’ that started is portraying Bigfoot as a sexual predator. Here I can’t avoid some spoilers. Skip to the next section where I make my big recommendation if you want to avoid them.

Willow spends a good bit of time developing the likable characters at the center of the story and their positive relationship, though we get foreshadowing as to what is to come throughout: posters of missing local women, humorous comments about the size of Bigfoot’s anatomy. The film seems to end with Jim being killed and Kelley sexually enslaved ,along with at least one of the previously alluded-to missing women.

Other films pick up this thread. Primal Rage addresses this development but mostly chooses to evade this nihilistic conclusion (though it is pretty darn dark). However, I think Hoax (2019) pushes things in this direction the furthest (so far). The Hoax is basically any idea that reality or people are at all decent. We get the Bigfoot as (probably) a sexual predator thing which is being investigated by a cynical and ruthlessly self-interested down-and-out reality TV star looking for a comeback with inbred hillbilly cannibals who are definitely sexual predators (I kid you not) thrown in for good measure, just in case you thought there was any hope of salvation. Actually one of the better produced and acted Bigfoot movies, but, oh my.

On the life-affirming side of things (vs. nihilistic), but still with plenty of contemporary horror edge are Bigfoot: The Lost Coast Tapes (2012), Exists (2014), and Monstrous (2020).The latter film, written by a woman, actually pulls off a pretty decent deconstruction of some of our contemporary gender theory.

Recommendation:

So, having done all that work, what do I think is the best all-round Bigfoot movie? I’m going to go with American Bigfoot (2016). I will try very hard to avoid any spoilers. It is definitely in the low, low budget category of horror films.

It takes place in a locale I am very familiar with: the town of Nelsonville and the surrounding Hocking Hills region in southeast Ohio. The film talks about ‘the mine closing’ and the social fragmentation and alcoholism that ensue. Here is a complex place: naturally beautiful, socially damaged; messed up people with good hearts. While the people portrayed might be somewhat stereotyped, they are pretty likable, and the more eccentric ones are actually believable if you’re used to actual rural America.

Unlike in most horror films, we are shown the ‘monster’ pretty early on (so I don’t take this to be a spoiler). I think that is very intentional. This ‘monster’ maybe isn’t so monstrous (though it kills people). A major decision for low budget Bigfoot movie makers is how much of their budget to put into the costume/makeup for the ‘monster’ and for special effects? That’s usually a lot of what horror fans want to see. The producers of this film decided to put about $19.99 into those things. The ‘monster’ has some sort of shaggy costume and then basically a made-up human face. I admit that turned me off at first. I stopped watching this movie about 10 minutes in, the first two times I tried it. Glad I went for a third attempt. In addition to budget constraints, I think the film makers were intentionally saying something in this choice as well.

As to nature? Here, Kropotkin beats out Darwin. This movie is about dealing with hardship and taking care of those you love. It’s not just the humans who are in that situation. If there is something to believe in, maybe that’s a good place to start.

Happy Halloween and let me know if you spot Bigfoot anywhere!